Business Intelligence Network Business Intelligence Resources

Blog: William McKnight

Main

August 17, 2007

Enterprise Search, a new horizon

If you were building a business intelligence tool from scratch today, in 2007, you would probably develop it as an enterprise search tool with user access capabilities that accommodate English-like approaches to query. And, indeed, that seems to be the horizon of a different set of tools such as those by Fast, Coppereye and Endeca, all of which appear to tolerate the DBMS, but also are poised to access information in disparate places. You may or may not consider these as BI vendors, but I suggest they are.

Continue reading "Enterprise Search, a new horizon" »

Posted by William McKnight at 2:40 PM | | Comments (0)

March 7, 2006

The new OLAP Report is out

I always enjoy the well-researched OLAP Report that Nigel Pendse does annually. The report for 2005 is out (link.) The market continues to grow (close to $6M the way Nigel measures it, which he explains on the site.) The trajectories of the top 5 and top 10 vendors has been flat the last 2 years, but remains around 95% (top 10) and 75% (top 5). This is not a space letting in many new vendors to the big time.

Over the last several years, there has been nice upward slopes for Microsoft and downward slopes for Hyperion (which remains #2) and Oracle. I expect the latest release for Oracle to turn that slope somewhat in 2006.

Posted by William McKnight at 9:53 AM | | Comments (0)

September 12, 2005

It's (still) about ease-of-use

A recent study by InformationWeek confirms that ease-of-use is still most important when purchasing BI software or selecting a vendor. This is well worth repeating since I still see many BI professionals, myself included at times, that get lulled into believing that modern data access tools are indeed "user friendly" to actual users.

Accoutrements to the development of the end user interface include training, metadata and data stewardship as well as effective usage design.

One company that brings us a new paradigm in data access for applications with a visual orientation is Tableau Software.

Continue reading "It's (still) about ease-of-use" »

Posted by William McKnight at 8:14 AM | | Comments (0)